Entropy Reduction correlates with temporal lobe activity

WS 2017  ·  Matthew Nelson, Stanislas Dehaene, Christophe Pallier, John Hale ·

Using the Entropy Reduction incremental complexity metric, we relate high gamma power signals from the brains of epileptic patients to incremental stages of syntactic analysis in English and French. We find that signals recorded intracranially from the anterior Inferior Temporal Sulcus (aITS) and the posterior Inferior Temporal Gyrus (pITG) correlate with word-by-word Entropy Reduction values derived from phrase structure grammars for those languages. In the anterior region, this correlation persists even in combination with surprisal co-predictors from PCFG and ngram models. The result confirms the idea that the brain{'}s temporal lobe houses a parsing function, one whose incremental processing difficulty profile reflects changes in grammatical uncertainty.

PDF Abstract

Code
Add Remove Mark official

No code implementations yet. Submit your code now

Tasks
Add Remove

Datasets

  Add Datasets introduced or used in this paper

Results from the Paper
Add Remove

  Submit results from this paper to get state-of-the-art GitHub badges and help the community compare results to other papers.

Methods
Add Remove

No methods listed for this paper. Add relevant methods here
Contact us on: hello@paperswithcode.com . Papers With Code is a free resource with all data licensed under CC-BY-SA.
Terms Data policy Cookies policy